You wouldn't take Lewis for an immortal cyborg: he looks like a dapper character from a Noel Coward play. And Joseph-short and stocky in his Armani suit, with a neatly trimmed black mustache and beard that give him a cheerfully villainous look-you'd never guess that his parents drew the Neolithic cave paintings in the Cèvennes. But what are these two operatives of the Company doing in an amusement arcade in San Francisco in 1996? They're looking for Mendoza, fellow cyborg of Dr. Zeus Incorporated who has been banished Back Way Back. They're also trying to solve the mystery of her impossibly reappearing English mortal lover. Soon they will begin uncovering some extremely hush-hush stuff about what the Company has been doing with the cyborgs it no longer wants in the field. With this fourth book in the Company series, Kage Baker once again takes the reader on a wry, intelligent, and absorbing journey into the future and the past.

Review&colon;

"Sin exists," says Joseph, an immortal cyborg agent employed by Dr. Zeus, Inc., and in this fourth novel of Kage Baker's Company series, it certainly does. The Graveyard Game follows agents Joseph and Lewis as they try to find their missing friend Mendoza, who's been exiled to the Back Way Back as punishment for anti-Company activities.

Dr. Zeus, a time-travel corporation, created cyborgs to selectively preserve artifacts from the past for the edification of the 24th century, when the Company exists. But as the centuries go by for the agents, they hear strange rumors of a "silence" in the year 2355. Ominously, cyborgs who try to investigate disappear forever, hidden away or shut down by Dr. Zeus.

Joseph and Lewis become obsessed with finding Mendoza, and along the way, they uncover evidence of bizarre and dangerous Company deeds. Joseph finds strange underground holding cells, with "retired" agents in vats of preserving fluid. Meanwhile, Lewis researches the activities of Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, the odd mortal who was with Mendoza when she disappeared. The two get together to discuss their disheartening quest in present-day Ghirardelli Square. Cyborgs get stoned on chocolate, and they order round after round of hot cocoa, even snorting the stuff, until a Company security tech finds them:

On the floor between their respective briefcases was a souvenir bag stuffed with boxes of chocolate cable cars, and the table was littered with foil wrappers from the chocolate they had already consumed.... The security tech scanned them and recoiled slightly at the level of Theobromos in their systems. He surveyed the litter of foil wrappers and empty cups, regarded the cocoa powder in Joseph's beard, and sighed. Two old professionals on a sloppy bender.

The Graveyard Game, the best and darkest Company novel yet, showcases Kage Baker's smart, witty style. She teases readers with enough evidence of Company nastiness to make us root for the sometimes morally shifty cyborgs, while continuing to further the substantial plot. It's an extremely satisfying chapter in an excellent science fiction series, one that sets the stage for the confrontation to come. --Therese Littleton

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